by Rod Dreher
ages: adult
First sentence: “
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Review copy was sent by the publisher to my husband, who then passed it on to me.

I’ve been hearing for years from my husband about Rod Dreher, with whom he’s had a passing internet “relationship” for quite some time. I’ll be up front: Hubby loved this book. And when he (Hubby, not Rod) passed me this book he said, “You need to read this so you can understand why I want a cow.”

The book, simply, is Rod’s memoir about his growing up in a small Louisiana town, and his relationship with his younger sister as she battled cancer.

Writing that sentence made this book seem really trite, when it actually wasn’t. There are a lot of layers to this — I can see why Hubby enjoyed it — about the the good and bad in individual people, about tension within families, about the tragedy of an early death. Rod has a good story here, and is (thankfully) honest about the good and the bad in all situations. But, mostly what comes through is the love that he has for his sister, Ruthie, and the love that the town had for her.

I was grateful that he showed the tension between the positive and the negative; Ruthie was never deified (even though he considers her a Saint, in the traditional religious sense), and came off as a very good, very human person. I appreciated that he acknowledged the importance of place in a person’s life, and how good it is to belong somewhere. I appreciated, too, that he recognized that living in a small town (especially a small Southern town) is a double-edged sword: there are equal measures of generosity and backbiting involved.

The only drawback was the kind-of clunky writing style. Rod’s a columnist, and many times this read like a really, really long newspaper column or blog post. But, once I got used to that, I could sit back and enjoy the story he had to tell. I don’t know if it was a great one — and I’m still not sure about the whole cow thing — but it was a good one. And I appreciate my husband wanting to share that with me.